Walmart
Christopher was hired to build and scale the design function across Walmart Marketplace, Fulfillment, and Logistics. His work transformed spreadsheet-heavy workflows into a future-state platform vision, then backcast that vision into the systems, teams, and product chapters required to execute it.
The Problem
Walmart Marketplace was offering only bare-minimum fulfillment, with “WFS Lite” leaning on account managers, legacy tools, and manual spreadsheets just to set up and track inventory, warehousing, and services.
How might we turn that into a market-leading fulfillment experience that can compete with and surpass Amazon's FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon)?
Approach
Use seller insight, data, and benchmarking to understand friction.
Envision the future for sellers as a unified enterprise platform.
Bring design, PM, ops, business, and engineering leaders into one narrative.
Create the teams and patterns needed to ship platform-scale work.
Consolidate fulfillment directly into Seller Center.
Open Walmart logistics as a service through WLS.
Before and after
Manual spreadsheets and fragmented internal tooling.
Setup, inventory, warehousing, and services tracked through handoffs.
Integrated Seller Center dashboards, onboarding, and item setup.
Value-added services, catalog controls, and platform-grade fulfillment options.
Business context
The goal was ambitious: dramatically increase Seller Center and WFS contribution to Walmart Marketplace revenue while building the design organization required to support Marketplace, Fulfillment, and Logistics as one connected growth engine.
At the start, WFS Lite relied on manual spreadsheets, complex internal interfaces, and heavy account-manager involvement. The opportunity required operational transformation, service design, and a world-class user experience to compete with Amazon.
After surpassing benchmarks and goals, the vision expanded. Data revealed a new opportunity: What if the logistics capabilities extended beyond just selling at Walmart?
In a design sprint led by the UX team, Walmart Logistics Solutions (WLS) was conceived—unlocking the logistics network as a service. Not planning to sell to Walmart customers? No problem. Pack, store, or ship with us instead.
WLS was sized by the business as a $3B opportunity.
Org scaling
Team growth, team structure, and marketplace share 2022–2025.
WLS chapter
Opportunity sizing
$3B
New logistics-as-a-service business model sized at launch.
Pilot velocity
10 weeks
From discovery and design to an initial build and live pilot.
Pilot launch
PepsiCo
Enterprise-scale seller partner for the first WLS deployment.
Strategic shift
Network as a service
Reframed Walmart’s logistics network as a product in its own right.
Results so far
In a cross-functional design sprint, the team conceived a viable vision for the ideal fulfillment platform, then backcast from that vision to an MVP pilot with real milestones.
They moved from discovery and design to working code in ten weeks, launching a live pilot with PepsiCo in late Q4 2024.
By the time Christopher left Walmart, WLS was on track toward the $3B opportunity, with PepsiCo committing long-term to WFS and stepping away from FBA in contract negotiations.
The original objective
Actual Results
Final thought